After more than 13 years in Turkey, where he fled the war, the grandson of the late Syrian thinker Jaudat Said, known as the “Arab Gandhi,” returned to his village in the Golan Heights. Ibn Rushd Hajji Bayram left it as a ninth-grade student, and now, after the fall of the Assad regime in December 2024, he found his homeland in ruins. He spoke about how his family was forced to flee and shared memories of his grandfather, who devoted his life to the ideas of nonviolence and intellectual reform.
Hajji Bayram recalls that the war first forced the family to relocate to Damascus, and in 2012 they made the final decision to leave. “There were 30 of us. We gathered the whole family and understood that we could no longer stay here. At the time, the intelligence services were looking for my grandfather,” he says. In December 2012, they went to Turkey by a long land route—together with their grandfather, their mother, brothers, and uncle, fleeing persecution by the regime.
In Turkey, the family began rebuilding their lives. “We spent 13 years there. When I left Syria, I was in ninth grade, and there I continued my education, entered university, and graduated from the Faculty of Dentistry,” he shares. The first scenes of killings still remain in his memory, and he admits it is a very heavy feeling. Jaudat Said, for decades, had been a beekeeper and livestock breeder, but the war destroyed everything he had created.
Hajji Bayram also spoke about his grandfather’s creative path: for many years, Said worked as a teacher. His ideas drew the regime’s anger, and when the state realized their influence, Said was removed from teaching. At the same time, he continued writing books, but throughout his life he refused to take any money for his work, believing that knowledge belongs to everyone. The thinker’s philosophy was built on the principle of nonviolence, which he called the essence of the Islamic message. He was inspired by the Meccan period of the life of the Prophet Muhammad and loved to repeat: “You cannot change a person without persuading him,” as well as “If we want to change society, we must start with ourselves.” Jaudat Said was born in 1931 in the village of Bir Ajim into a Circassian family and died in Istanbul in 2022 at the age of 91.
Hajji Bayram speaks of his return as one of the strongest impressions of his life. He found the place where he grew up turned into ruins: “When I returned, the village had no life, but there were memories. I felt as if I had never left it.” He walked again along the familiar lanes and past the schools, and despite the devastation, the past came alive in his mind. In conclusion, he called the events in Syria a “liberation war” and expressed hope that the country will overcome the consequences of the war and begin a new stage of reconstruction.
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How did the Circassian community end up in Syria, and why are there Circassian villages in the Golan Heights, such as Bir Ajim? — The Circassians were resettled to the Middle East after the Caucasus War in the 1860s, when the Russian Empire conquered the Caucasus. The Ottoman Empire dispersed hundreds of thousands of Circassians across its provinces, including Syria and the Golan Heights. The settlers were expected to serve the empire: protect trade routes, guard the borders, and develop sparsely populated lands. That is how Circassian villages came into being, including Bir Ajim, whose residents still preserve their Circassian identity and language.
Why did the village of Bir Ajim, located in the Golan Heights, remain under Syrian control despite the fact that most of the Golan Heights has been under Israeli occupation since 1967? — In 1967, Israel seized almost all of the Golan, but after the 1973 war, a Disengagement of Forces Agreement (1974) was signed. Under it, the Israeli army withdrew from some territories, and along the ceasefire line a UN buffer zone was established. Syria regained a narrow strip with the city of Quneitra, and Bir Ajim was precisely on the Syrian side of that line—east of the Israeli positions. Therefore, the village remained under Damascus’s control, and its residents remained Syrian citizens.
Why did the Assad regime consider Jaudat Said’s ideas so dangerous that the intelligence services hunted him, and how did his preaching on nonviolence threaten the authorities? — Jaudat Said was a Circassian Syrian thinker and Islamic scholar, known as the “voice of nonviolence.” He argued that change should not happen through armed struggle, but through education, moral upbringing, and peaceful resistance. For an authoritarian regime, this idea was more dangerous than armed opposition: it undermined the very logic of rule based on fear and violence. If people stop fearing and choose nonviolent disobedience, the authorities are left with neither a moral nor political justification for repression. That is why the intelligence services monitored Said, restricted his movements, and tried to silence him— the regime saw his preaching as a hidden threat to its very existence.
Full version: بعد 13 عاما من اللجوء.. حفيد "غاندي العرب" يعود إلى الجولان السوري (فيديو)